Theory of everything brilliant

The Theory of Everything

Staring: Eddie Redmayne, Felicity Jones, Charlie Cox, Emily Watson, Simon McBurney

Rated: 9/10

Stephen Hawking, as we all know, is the most celebrated specimen of destiny defying human endeavour and has, well, defied theory of everything fatal in his lifetime of 70 plus and still going strong. For a scientist of such repute, who has ruled the minds and appreciation of the world with his scientific philosophy and what he called “physics of lust” when he was young and able bodied, a film has always been in the making.

When he was made the subject of The Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe getting the honours — and the complex proposition — to play Hawking, it was an arresting but runaway hit, a darling of the Oscars.

Now, with The Theory of Everything, the story still remains the same — potent, pulling, moving, compelling, awe-inspiring and legendary — much the same as the personality himself. Only, this time round the film starts as life started with Stephen Hawking — as a brilliant but lazy young mind with an extreme bout of intelligence; as a student who was queer and awkward but compelling nevertheless; as a man in love; as a scientist friend; as a pugnacious mind and only then as a victim of a degenerative motor muscle disease from which killed every muscle in his body except the one that kept him thinking, fighting and soaring over his unimaginable disability, a kind of disability that made you squirm in frustration thousands of miles away and much removed from the daily chores of this legendary scientist.

To play such a man, or should one say superhuman man in a wheelchair, needed an actor of superhuman gumption and this film finds one in Eddie Redmayne. He did not just slip into the skin of Hawking but also moved him to tears.

“He looked like me, acted like me and had my sense of humour,” Hawking said after Eddie won the much deserved Golden Globe Award for Beat Actor. He is definitely a strong candidate for the Oscars too. To have so much control over your motor movements to be able to so realistically portray a man with no control whatsoever over his, is a superlative effort and Eddie has no rivals there.

The acumen of director James Marsh lies in the fact that he has helmed over a moving story of a living legend with caution, correctness and care. All his characters, like Hawking’s wife of many years Jane (played brilliantly by Felicity Jones) and her love, commitment, frustrations and fierce support of Hawking, have been unravelled with reverence and care that can come only from a sensitive but brilliant cinematic mind. The USP of this film also lies in the time frame that it spans over. It starts from those syrupy Cambridge days when Hawking is a youthful student of science with all his elements in control. The way the disease creeps in is beautifully portrayed by James and executed by Eddie.

The Theory of Everything comes highly recommended and on the high platform of five top Oscar nominations for this year.

Source: Sunday Pioneer, 18 January, 2015